When human beings try to dream up a model of reality, they rarely go far from what is
generally known. When we communicate, we have to use what we share. It has been said that
medieval cosmogonies were inspired by the court hierarchy of the late Roman Empire 
the Emperor or Empress at the summit, and widening rings of court officials with more and
more bizarre titles, mirrored in the Celestial Hierarchies of the Neoplatonist
pseudo-Dionysus, which in turn became the basis for Dantes The Divine Comedy.

It is certainly the case that in Kabbalah a wide range of commonplace descriptive
metaphors are used  seas, fountains, and rivers; the human body; conjugal relations
between man and woman; the halls and gates of a kings palace; a king and his
subjects; a mother bird and her chicks; these are only a few examples. This rich seam of
metaphor and allegory is part of the beauty of Kabbalah. A beginner can grasp these
metaphors at an intuitive level, and they continue to yield meaning after many years of
contemplation.

The ship narrative is one of the oldest literary forms. From the legend of Jason and
the Argonauts to the Mutiny on the Bounty to StarTrek, writers have used
the ship as a social microcosm. Much of the attraction of the ship narrative is its
boundedness, the close physical proximity of its protagonists combined with a rigid social
hierarchy. The ship is a closed community, an island universe of souls who survive against
the odds in a hostile environment. The ship "boldly goes" into the unknown, and
survives because its crew sacrifice their freedom and a large part of their individuality
in order to carry out formal roles essential to the survival of the community.

The ship is interesting as a metaphor because it is both One and Many. Seen from the
outside it is One. It has to be One because the outside is hostile, inimical to human
life. Seen from the inside it is Many, human beings trying to live their lives as
individuals while constrained by the hierarchy and discipline necessary to confront a
hostile environment. Many forms of human organisation conform to this pattern in varying
degrees, and there is much in common between the ship and the all-pervasive modern
corporation riding out the storms of the market and attacks by competitors.

Kabbalah also attempts to reconcile the ideas of the One and the Many, the unity of God
and the diversity of the creation. When the divine order of the creation is contrasted
with the malevolent and chaotic realms of the qlippoth, links with the ship narrative
become apparent. The creation myth of Sumer and Akkad, one of the earliest literary myths
in our possession, tells of the victory of a creator god against the chaotic powers of the
deeps. This myth lingers in the creation story of Genesis, and has found its way with
Kabbalah with little loss of mythical intensity. The deeps (tehom), the waters that
God separated, remain as a symbol of the hostile and chaotic powers that threaten the
integrity of the creation.

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life can be viewed as a model of organism and governance.
Viewed as an organism it is often shown superimposed on the human body, emphasising how
the spheres underpin the dynamics and functioning of a living thing. As a model of
governance it employs the oldest metaphor for governance, that of kingship. At its
heart (Tipheret) is the King. His crown is Kether, and his sword and sceptre are Gevurah
and Chesed, the two primary aspects of leadership which stand traditionally for mercy and
severity. His martial hosts are Hod and Netzach (hence the divine name Tzabaot) and
the kingdom is Malkuth. The King is the One, and his subjects are the Many. When the
Kabbalah began, the King with his subjects was the most pervasive form of collective human
organisation.

To explore this idea of organism and governance further, I have chosen to look at one
of the most popular contemporary ship narratives, the voyages of the U.S.S. Enterprise,
as told in the television series Star Trek - The Next Generation. This is a useful
example because most people have seen episodes and are familiar with the crew, their roles
and their characters. They are more familiar today than the Greek, Roman or Egyptian
pantheons of gods and goddesses, and the Star Trek script writers have clearly been
inspired by the usual archetypes. Like most soap operas Star Trek attempts to
address contemporary social issues - cultural diversity, variant sexual customs,
non-interference and self determinism, core moral and ethical issues and so on. Whether it
succeeds is largely irrelevant - emulating a lowbrow Plato, its dialogues are as close to
a challenging ethical debate as many children are likely to receive.

From an external point of view, the Enterprise functions like a simple organism.
It moves from place to place. It has a wide range of sensors, and interacts with its
environment. It responds in a complex manner to approaches and threats, even to the extent
of defending itself with deadly force.

The Enterprise behaves like this because a complex structure of formal roles,
regulations, and discipline (governance) results in a crew that works together, and the
entertainment value in a large proportion of episodes is watching how the crew achieve and
maintain this cohesion in the face of problems that are often life-threatening.

It is possible to assign leading members of the crew to sephiroth on the Tree of Life,
just as people have assigned planets, gods and goddesses from various pantheons, colours
etc.

There may be some who find this trivialises a deep subject, but in response I will say
that metaphors are the creations of human beings. We have no more license to worship our
favourite metaphors, however ancient and revered, than we do to worship graven images.
Kabbalah has always employed intuitive metaphors, and Star Trek is as good a place to look
for metaphors as any other.

Malkuth

Malkuth is the Enterprise and her
crew.

Yesod

The man in charge of the machinery of the universe is Chief Engineer Geordi
LaForge. He is blind (like the demiurge Ialdebaoth/Samael in gnostic myth) and so his
vision is augmented using an implant.

Hod

The android Data is the essence of unemotional intellect. Although
human-created, he is officially recognised as an autonomous life form with full legal
privileges. Data yearns for human experience, laughter, feeling, and irrationality.
According to purely logical and rational criteria he is superhuman, and yet we suspect
that if he was genuinely rational, he would be incapable of acting ethically, and perhaps
even of reaching any kind of decision - if you dont know what you want, you
dont get it.

Data shares Hod with Dr. Beverley Crusher, the Chief Medical Officer.
Medicine has reached the level where it is more akin to bio-engineering, and Dr. Crusher
is a highly skilled technical specialist usually seen wielding a battery of diagnostic
instruments.

Netzach

Deanna Troi is the ships counsellor, the Starfleet equivalent of
Inhuman Resources. She is a Betazoid and an empath, which means she is forever sensing
peoples moods. The series gives her license to wear spray-on clothing, which hides
nothing of her generous figure. By coincidence, the actress who plays the part is called
Marina Sirtis, and she invariably gives the impression of Venus newly arisen from the
Cypriot surf.

The picture on the right confirms the general impression.

Tiphereth

The heart of the Enterprise is the bridge, and hence I have used a picture
of the main characters posed in the bridge. The photo used is unusual in that it is one of
the few group photos that contains Guinan.

The crew member that approximates to Tiphereth is Riker. Riker is the
ships First Officer, and the First Officer is at the heart of a ship, normally
responsible for the day-to-day running and operational integrity of a ship. Jonathon
Frakes, who plays Riker, has a difficult role because the attention to administrative
detail required in the First Officer role - duty rosters, repairs, staff problems, etc -
tends not to be visible in a 60 minute format, and so he is depicted as the general
purpose, superbly competent all-good guy forever in Picards shadow.

In many ways it would be appropriate to place Picard at the heart of the ship, but no
other ships officer could take his place in Chesed.

Gevurah

Worf is the Security Officer. A Klingon, steeped in the rituals of Klingon
militancy and violence, Worf is controlled to the point of having difficulty with
emotional relationships.

Worf is a brilliant depiction of Gevurah. His dominating motivations are duty and
honour, so his behaviour is tightly constrained by whatever he considers to be dutiful and
honourable. He is not afraid to die upholding duty and honour and exhibits something close
to a death urge - he would make a good Kamikaze. He is intensely conservative and
protective of the Enterprise - his advise to Picard can frequently be parodied by
the famous saying made by the Papal Legate during the Cathar crusade: "Kill them all
- God will know his own".

Despite the violence simmering below the surface, Worf bottles his feelings and rarely
gives way to emotion.

Chesed

Jean Luc Picard embodies authority. Controlled and decisive, his motivation
at all times is to "do the right thing", and so he is usually at the centre of
the various ethical dilemmas that the crew are required to solve.

Picard does not manage by consensus. Something that the actor Patrick Stewart portrays
effectively is an unquestionable sense of authority, an intimidating sense of authority.
There is never the slightest doubt who is in charge of the Enterprise.

Picard is not the jovial type. He tends to be snappish, intense, often ill-tempered,
but this rarely intrudes on his decision making or concern for the welfare of the crew.
This concern extends beyond the crew and can be characterised by an altruistic humanism, a
belief that the common good has to be actively upheld, fought for, and its formative
principles should not be sacrificed by expedient decision making.

Binah

Guinan is a woman shrouded in mystery. When the plot demands it, she plays
the role of mother to the crew, and even Picard goes to her for advice. She is one of his
very few confidants.

She is old - centuries old - and due to a bizarre temporal happenstance she comes from
the distant past. Her race was destroyed by the Borg, a circumstance that recalls the
destroyed worlds of the Kings of Edom in the Zohar.

Binah is also represented by the Federation Directives, a binding set of principles
used to regulate the behaviour of the ships crew. The best known is the Prime
Directive which covers non-interference with other life forms, but there are a couple of
dozen others.

Chokhmah

It is difficult to provide good symbols for Chokhmah, but I have chosen the
seal of the United Federation of Planets. If there is anything that empowers the Enterprise
to "boldly go", it is this.